Many local area network (LAN) products today use a medium formed by twisted copper wire pairs for the transmission and reception of data. For these products, there is typically a requirement to use one or more wire pairs for the transmission of data, and one or more wire pairs to receive the data.
The existing technologies based on the twisted copper wire pairs are as follows:
(1) 10BASE-T: This technology is a version of Ethernet in which stations are attached by two unshielded twisted pairs (UTP), which is the traditional cables used for telephone lines. The 10Base-T technology uses a star formation, and has a signaling rate of 10 Mbaud (10 megabits per second) on each pair.
(2) 100BASE-TX: This technology uses two UTP and has a signaling rate of 125 Mbaud on each pair. The 100BASE-TX technology is the UTP cabling scheme that is used with 100BASE-T which is a networking standard that supports data transfer rates up to approximately 100 Mbps (100 megabits per second). The 100BASE-T standard is officially referred to as IEEE 802.3u and is commonly referred to as Fast Ethernet because it is approximately ten times faster than Ethernet.
(3) 1000BASE-T: This technology uses four UTP and a signaling rate of 125 Mbaud on each pair. This method includes multi-level signaling, echo-cancellation, and complex Digital Signal Processing (DSP) and thereby allows each of the four pairs to be used for transmission and reception of data. The 1000BASE-T technology is the specification for Gigabit Ethernet over copper wire (IEEE 802.3ab).
All of these technologies have the ability to negotiate speed, duplex operation, flow-control, and other important aspects of a link operation by using low frequency pulses to communicate the desired state of operation for the link prior to actually engaging in the specific link signaling. This negotiation process is called “auto-negotiation”. For the 10 Gigabit operation, this auto-negotiation is not possible because the underlying signaling technology (XAUI) operates at 3.125 Gigabaud, and there is no specification in this underlying XAUI signaling technology standard for operating in the 10 Gigabit operation.
Therefore, the current technology is limited in its capabilities and suffers from at least the above constraints and deficiencies.